Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Thursday, November 08, 2018

Turbines Kill So Many Birds They're Effectively an Apex Predator

We’ve long since known that wind turbines are a danger to birds.
A typical wind farm can kill thousands of birds every year, including
raptors like falcons and eagles. The deaths of these larger birds are
the real problem because they can cause ripple effects throughout the
entire ecosystem.

Take, for instance, a wind
farm in the Western Ghats region of India, where a group of researchers
from the Indian Institute of Science performed their study.
In the area of the wind farm, raptors were around four times less
common than in other areas. They kept dying to the turbines, which is
not great for the raptors but good news for fan-throated lizards, the
raptors’ prey. In and around the wind farm,
lizard populations exploded, completely unchecked by predation. So few
of them were being eaten that they even lost almost all fear of danger.
The researchers found they could approach the lizards without their
running away. The lizards, in turn, reduced the population of their own
prey species, causing a dramatic change in the ecosystem...MORE